Books like The Fire Rose

This adaptation of Beauty and the Beast cuts out the merchant father and sisters mourning their sudden impoverishment. Instead of a formerly-wealthy beauty, our heroine is the recently-orphaned daughter of a professor. Highly educated herself, but lacking family or funds, she perforce accepts a position as a governess in far-away California. But it turns out there are no children, only a Beast who needs someone to translate some dead languages...This was a fun book. It would be better if Lackey weren't so infernally heavy-handed. Her villain, especially, is painted so uniformly black that there is no nuance. He is greedy! and shallow! and full of treachery! He likes to beat and rape virgins! He hates foreign food (cuz he's a racist; good guys in this universe always love the curry). One begins to question how the supposedly-smart master wizard was taken in by this piece of offal for so long. Of course, this is a wizard so skilled he accidentally turned himself into an alsatian...A flawed book, but one that may be entertaining to readers with a penchant for fairy-tales retellings, the theory of the elements, or turn of the century settings.